Itkovian stared across the basin. An army of corpses identical to the one beside him surrounded the demons, of which only two remained standing. The battle around those two creatures was horrible to witness. Pieces of the undead warriors flew in all directions, but still they kept coming, huge flint swords chopping into the demons, carving them down where they stood. A half-dozen heartbeats later, the fight was over.

The Shield Anvil judged that at least sixty of the fur-clad warriors had been destroyed. The others continued chopping on the felled beasts, swinging ever lower as the remaining pieces grew ever smaller. Even as he watched, dust swirled from the hillsides in every direction – more of the undead warriors with their weapons of stone. An army, motionless beneath the sun.

‘We did not know that K’Chain Che’Malle had returned to this land,’ the hide-wrapped corpse said.

Itkovian’s remaining soldiers approached, tense, driven into watchful silence by the conjurations rising on all sides.

‘Who,’ Itkovian asked dully, ‘are you?’

‘I am the Bonecaster Pran Chole, of the Kron T’lan Imass. We are come to the Gathering. And, it seems, to a war. I think, mortal, you have need of us.’

The Shield Anvil looked upon his ten surviving soldiers. The recruit was among them, but not her two guardians. Twenty. Soldiers and horses. Twenty ... gone. He scanned the faces now arrayed before him, and slowly nodded. ‘Aye, Pran Chole, we have need.’

The recruit’s face was the hue of bleached parchment. She sat on the ground, eyes unfocused, spattered with the blood of one or both of the soldiers who had given their lives protecting her.

Itkovian stood beside her, saying nothing. The brutality of the engagement may well have broken the Capan recruit, he suspected. Active service was intended to hone, not destroy. The Shield Anvil’s underestimation of the enemy had made of this young woman’s future a world of ashes. Two blindingly sudden deaths would haunt her for the rest of her days. And there was nothing Itkovian could do, or say, to ease the pain.

‘Shield Anvil.’

He looked down at her, surprised that she would speak, wondering at the hardness of her voice. ‘Recruit?’

She was looking round, eyes thinning as she studied the legions of undead warriors who stood in ragged ranks, unmoving, on all sides. ‘There are thousands.’

Spectral figures, risen to stand above the plain’s tawny grasses, row on row. As if the earth herself had thrust them clear of her flesh. ‘Aye. I’d judge well over ten thousand. T’lan Imass. Tales of these warriors had reached us’ – tales I found hard to countenance – ‘but this represents our first encounter, and a timely one at that.’

‘Do we return to Capustan now?’